The Single Substation has safety measures consistent with previous years’ human player stations. There’s a door for game pieces that cannot be opened from the field side, and there’s a rule (H505) that prevents human players from reaching into the chute volume for more than a few seconds.
However, the Double Substation seems markedly unsafe compared to these standards. There is a bent plastic cover, but the distance between the field-side opening and the human-side opening is only a couple inches; it would be very easy for a person to reach their arm through. There’s not even a rule against doing so, since H505 specifically limits only interactions with the Single Substation.
The only rule which might limit this is H103, the rule which gives a verbal warning for walking on the field before the lights turn green. (There’s also a blue box which incorrectly labels it H202, and describes egregious behavior despite no penalty for egregious behavior). But that only restricts reaching all the way through to the field. There’s nothing keeping a player from resting their arm inside the Double Substation Portal, where a robot might hit it (also legal, per G102)
What’s up with this? Have I missed something? Are these measures acceptable for normal play?
There’s nothing physically preventing someone from jumping the sidewalls onto the field during play, and I remember one instance where an FTA did so. Nothing preventing teams from powering their robot in the pits and doing who knows what to bystanders. There’s only so much you can do to prevent human error, and at some point the word “reasonable” comes into play. Hopefully no “reasonable” person would reach through the station to touch a robot. You need to go out of your way to do this.
But it’s not too convoluted a scenario in which a human player comes into contact with a robot mechanism, even if both are following the rules, not being intentionally unsafe, and the human player even follows H505 as if it applied to the double portal.
Say a robot is trying to get a cone on the shelf, but knocks it off. The human player’s panicking–they return the shelf, look down to grab a cone, and slam it into the portal. The drive team’s panicking–they drive the robot back and forth a bit, trying to realign their robot despite a couple game pieces on the ground, and their manipulator goes into the portal. The drive team is going to pull the robot back from the portal as soon as they notice, but the human player’s hand has already been scuffed or caught in the spinning chain on top of the manipulator.
In this situation, nobody is trying to break the rules or act unsafely, but someone syill got hurt. It might be the case that such situations are rare enough, and the damage minor enough to be acceptable.
But my personal opinion is that the current field is unsafe for play, and should be modified in a team update.
